Superintendent's Message

Joseph Nohra
Superintendent

Dear Liberty Community,

We are looking forward to another wonderful year in the Liberty Local School District. We continue to advance and work to meet the needs of our students. We are very proud of our integration of S.T.E.M. into the classroom. During the 2017-2018 school year, we quadrupled our S.T.E.M. instruction. Through our S.T.E.M. curriculum, our students are engaged in real world, hands-on projects. They are able to develop innovative ways of thinking and problem solving by debating and creating solutions with each other. We are also very proud of our new robotics programming that we offered to our middle school students. We will continue to offer that to even more students during the 2018-2019 school year as we look forward to offering new career tech courses to our students including Drone Technology, Cybersecurity and Introduction to Engineering.

The Liberty Local School District continues to integrate technology into the classroom. Mobile Chromebook carts are available to all of our classrooms enabling our students and staff to collaborate in a digital world. We are quickly advancing toward a one-to-one student-to-Chromebook ratio. This year, all students in grades 7-12 will have their own Chromebook. Students in grades 2-6 will continue to have access to Chromebook carts in their classrooms and there will be five Chromebooks in each kindergarten and first grade classroom.

As a school district, we continue to connect with our community. We also opened a Liberty Youth Recreation Impact Center last year, in collaboration with the Jewish Community Center, to offer after school and recreational programming to not only our students, but to the entire Liberty community. We will continue to hold focus groups with all of our stakeholders for the “Your Voice, Your Schools” initiative. We are working diligently to create a strategic plan with parents, residents, business owners, staff and students that will guide the school district into the future.

The Liberty Local School District works hard to maintain a safe and welcoming environment for all of our students and staff. Our district-wide positive behavioral interventions and supports program, which guides the way in which we discipline students has led to a dramatic reduction in behavior issues, including suspensions and expulsions. This reduction fostered better learning and teaching environments for our students and staff.

We have made significant improvements in the way of security. The Liberty Board of Education contracted with the Liberty Police Department to employ a school resource officer (SRO) in the school district during school hours. The goal of the partnership is to create and maintain safe, secure and orderly learning environments for students, teachers and staff. This is a proactive strategy designed to bring prevention and intervention into the schools. The district’s partnership with the Liberty Police Department allows Liberty Local Schools to provide an elevated level of security and safety on campus. It also builds rapport with the students. We look forward to continuing this partnership this year.

I want to assure you your tax dollars are appropriately being used to support high quality education. Liberty students are being exposed to new and innovative ways of learning. Our district has successfully implemented safety measures to create a nurturing learning environment, in which our staff works so hard to ensure all of our students meet their potential.